The params object

A params object is instantiated for each request and contains the client request parameters. These include both query parameters in a HTTP GET request as well as form data in a HTTP POST. The parameters can be accessed using the standard Map interface.

A major difference between using the params object and directly accessing the QUERY_STRING environment variable is that in addition to splitting the string into keys and values, the values are fully decoded with the assumption that they have been encoded as utf-8 followed by x-www-urlencoded encoding.